Godslayer Rises Tomorrow?

Share this:

Two years on from the moderately successful launch of Age Of Conan (I’m not really endorsing it here, I fell asleep after the first bit in the port, and ended up feeling deflated) it seems the Funcom have completed a major expansion for the game, Rise Of The Godslayer. It’s £18 and can be bought by subscribers via digital download from tomorrow. There’s also going to be a new retail push with the game going out bundled with the expansion. The new stuff includes Asian-themed Khitai, which has a new player race, and no level cap increases. Eh, what? Yep, all the new stuff comes in the form of new skills and professions for characters to pursue, giving existing characters more to do, and making them more rounded denizens of made-up-barbarianland. Hooray!

It’s an onion wielding some chain saws, but I can’t rule out the possibility that under said chain saws there are some stigmata. It’s from Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

I’m trying to work out a way to make this post “on topic” so I suppose I’ll suggest that chainsaw wielding vegetation would be an excellent addition to any MMO, including Age of Conan. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

I really enjoyed my time in AOC – because I skipped the nasty launch and waiting until they polished it a bit.

The world is lovely – the graphics are lovelier – and combat is different – it feels VERY Conan.

I think it just didn’t appeal to the WoW-crowd – probably because the shoulder armour isn’t big enough and there aren’t enough cute pets and mounts and other shit to collect like you’re playing a Barbie game – or something.

Oh – the PvP is dreadful – EVERYONE is your enemy, nice one GREAT idea – but otherwise I likes it.

… a MMO is releasing an expansion tomorrow, one that was originally very successful but lost a lot of players due to many issues. It’s been 2 years of quiet in Conanland, so why *wouldn’t* this be posted on RPS?

Anyway, I liked a lot of the concepts of Conan, although I didn’t feel they were implemented that well. I’m willing to pick up this xpack and give it a shot, though. Even if I only last the month I think I’ll get my money’s worth out of it.

Wow is a black hole in MMOland – it sucks EVERYTHING in. It’s popularity and ubiquity is cripping the genre because no-one can compete with it and everyone just goes back there when they see anything ‘different’.

I genuinely think there will never be another game like WoW – developers need to find a niche in the market (as AOC, Eve, LOTRO and others have) and be happy with it. Mass gaming is probably going to coalesce around shit like Farmville instead.

Clearly AOC makes enough to keep going and even produce an expansion – that’s successful by most people’s estimations (and WAY better than Tabula Rasa, for example) but still people have to see it as a failure because it doesn’t have 11M subscribers (neither does WoW anymore ofc. but Blizzard have stopped updating us on that one!!).

I loved the idea of WoW – I loved my 3 years in there but it never gave me any ‘WAR’ and I really do resent the collectathon it’s degenerated into.

This reminds me of the great Orc Shoulder Armour disaster of 2 years ago. They accidentally shrunk all male Orc shoulder armour, ohhh there was lots of upset Orcs and every other playable race laughing at them.

This was actually surprisingly fun, more so than anything else in the game. Along with using various potions and things to get to places people shouldn’t. In the short time I was playing, I saw everything, I went everywhere, and I probably know of things that long-time World of Warcraft fans aren’t even aware of the existence of.

Then they took it all away… it became a treadmill again, and I moved on.

2.) The Plague

I actually picked up a trial version for this. There was one bug where people could carry a plague out of an instance with them, and everyone was dead, all the time, the cities were piled up with bodies, you couldn’t even move for a few seconds before you were infected again and fell.

The meta-game at the time was to try to find somewhere to hide where they wouldn’t find you, to live your time out in secrecy without being encountered by another soul. I setup shop on a little island that next to no one knew about, and started doing a deserted man’s diary sort of thing. It was the only time I wished that World of Warcraft allowed for writable books, a la Ultima Online.

@Wulf
Re 1.) Wall-walking.
Me and a friend were chatting outside Iron Forge one day when we were approached by another player called ‘God’. He said for a small fee he could take us to a place no one had ever seen. After some skillful negotiations we struck a deal and left for what would nearly be an hour trip. I can’t remember the route exactly but we ended up above the Iron Forge gate.
We had no choice but to jump off, fortunately I was an engineer and had some ingenious gadget too glide me to safety, wowing the on looking crowd below. While my colleagues plummeted to their deaths.
I just wondered if you had ever done that route yourself?

I also think the game got a very harsh and unfair drubbing, and I’m quietly rooting for it even though I’m not playing anymore.

Played for 3 months at launch and another month when they had that re-enlistment drive where they gave all lapsed subscribers a couple of free weeks a few months back. There was A LOT wrong with the game at launch, no question about that. But you know what? 90% of the whinging and moaning about the game wasn’t about its bugs, about its performance, about its content gap (which wasn’t as large as people said), or any of the rest of its genuine problems. Rather, 90% of the people were moaning about the items! THE SODDING ITEMS!! They were sad that the game had a very smooth itemisation curve, that the gear only got more powerful very slowly and gradually, and that the shiny new sword they got as a quest reward didn’t make them capable of splitting mountains in twain simply by dropping it.

I totally get that complaint: they didn’t like that the game didn’t provide frequent and noticeable rewards, that they had to play for longer chunks of time to feel that they achieved something. Fain enough. But, in that case, what they hell were they doing in that game? Funcom had always said that gear wouldn’t be very powerful in their game, and that it was a deliberate design decision so you wouldn’t need to grind raid instances for ages before you could compete in pvp. I was following the game for years before launch and it was the reason I (and several people who joined with me) went for this game! So to see the game slated for something that I consdired a plus was really annoying for me, and I was frequently on the verge of telling people to “go back to WoW” or something along those lines.

Sadder still that Funcom eventually decided to cave in to them and raised the power of most gear significantly. Especially since most of the people who were voicing those complaints left after the first month, so I don’t think any of their remaining userbase wanted the changes, or that any of the people who left for that reason came back. (It’s still ok though, it’s not like some MMOs where you literally don’t stand a prayer without the gear.)

Again, I reiterate, this is not to say that the game didn’t have other, genuine, technical and design problems at launch. Not all of which have been solved even when I did the re-trial thing last year (although most of them had). Its problems weren’t the reason I didn’t resubscribe though. The bits I hated about AoC the most were, in fact, the bits where it most resembes other MMOs: boring raids where 20 people pile up on a single enemy and wail on him for 20′ before he goes down.

Other pet peeves: people complaining about the lack of voice acting after Tortage, back before any other MMO (except Guild Wars) had ANY dialogue voice acting at all! And the people moaning about the content gap. There WAS one (especially in the late 60s, early 70s levels), but for people to say they ran out of quests at level 40 is a clear and outright lie.

I’ve played the first month. I don’t remember having any of these issues with itemization. Mostly because there was NO FRIGGING WAY to figure out how good an item was. There were some cryptic stats with cryptic values and nobody knew what they did and for how much. One doesn’t need to be a “wow loot whore” to want pellets, and need to know what equipment he is using and fighting for.

Aaaaand Eurogamer pull their review. There’s a lot of noise from the Conan community about it, and it sounds like they pulled it for factual inaccuracies. I don’t actually know.

What they’re complaining about is him criticising it for not increasing the level cap when Funcom decided to do parallel rather than direct enhancement, criticism copying China when Funcom actually copied Korea (one of the gates is a famous Korean one, for example) and complaining about a level eighty character having tons of skills and things that he didn’t understand. Which is Funcom’s fault for giving him such a character which would quite obviously be incomprehensible to someone who has never played the game before.

So a load of noise from the Conan group, some justified and some not. First time I’ve seen a review pulled in ages. Bad luck Mr. Smith.

Worth it 100%! Just don’t expect it to be a WoW-like experience going in, and don’t expect everything that you’d consider standard in WoW to be standard in there. IMO, it’s much better than WoW in everything apart from end-game raids, technical stability, overall polish, and server latency. WoW wins a huge point for the Dungeon Finder, though. AoC’s gameplay beats WoW’s by far, which was kept me going despite all the technical issues I encountered… one of the most fun I’ve ever had playing an MMO was tanking with a Dark Templar! So awesome!

Just ignore the haters and try it out for yourself. It’s very cheap now, so no matter what you can’t lose much here.

It’s a good thing AoC keeps on going, I guess. They must be doing something right.

For me, it was never an MMO I would easily step into, and especially considering the way the game launched (and crashed back down). I doubt I’ll ever get it just because of that niggling doubt saying something surely ought to be wrong.. then again, I’m not looking to get back into MMOs anyway.